Love's Labour's Lost

Summary

Love's Labour's Lost opens with a young king making a promise he cannot keep. Ferdinand of Navarre persuades three lords, Berowne, Longaville and Dumaine, to sign a statute turning his court into "a little academe": for three years they will study, fast one day a week, sleep three hours a night, and see no woman. Berowne signs under protest, warning that the oath forgets the nature of youth, and within the same scene it is discovered that the Princess of France is on her way to Navarre on a diplomatic errand about Aquitaine and a debt of a hundred thousand crowns. The King lodges her in a field outside his gates rather than break his decree, and the ladies treat this pedantic hospitality with the scorn it invites. A comic underplot keeps pace with the courtly one. Don Adriano de Armado, a Spanish braggart whose letters are swollen with ornament, loves the dairymaid Jaquenetta, as does the clown Costard. Holofernes the schoolmaster and Sir Nathaniel the curate trade Latin tags and admire each other's learning, while the constable Dull understands nothing. Misdelivered letters bring the two plots together. The great scene is Act IV, Scene iii. Each lord, thinking himself alone, reads a love poem aloud while the others hide and listen, until Berowne's own sonnet to Rosaline is brought in by Jaquenetta and Costard and all four stand convicted. Berowne then argues them out of their oath: women's eyes, he says, are the true books and academes, and it is "religion to be thus forsworn" because charity fulfils the law. The lords woo in the disguise of Muscovites; the ladies, warned, exchange favours and mock them into confusion. The rustics present the Nine Worthies, and the noble audience heckles them until Holofernes rebukes their bad manners. Then the messenger Marcadé enters with news that the Princess's father is dead, and the play turns. The ladies will not make a "world-without-end bargain" in an hour. The King must spend a year in a hermitage; Berowne must spend a twelvemonth jesting to the sick in a hospital, to learn whether his wit can serve anyone in pain. Berowne admits that the ending is not "like an old play": Jack hath not Jill. Two songs, of spring's cuckoo and winter's owl, close a comedy that defers its weddings and asks what speech and learning are for. The library attaches the full public-domain text (Project Gutenberg #1510), so every line cited here can be checked against the play itself.

Top Lessons

• Vows that ignore human nature

  The King's statute treats the body and the affections as enemies to be outlawed rather than ordered. Berowne warns at the signing that the Princess’s coming makes the oath unkeepable, and later that "abstinence engenders maladies". The play does not mock study or self-denial as such; it mocks a rash vow made for fame and imposed without regard for duty, hospitality or the facts at hand.

• Berowne's argument for breaking an oath

  In Act IV, Scene iii Berowne claims that the lords "lose our oaths to find ourselves" and that "charity itself fulfils the law." The speech is dazzling and partly true, because the oath was foolish; but it also borrows the language of Romans 13 to excuse what the lords want to do anyway. Students should admire the rhetoric and test its reasoning.

• Courtesy to those who perform badly

  The noble audience at the Nine Worthies pelts Holofernes, Nathaniel and Armado with jokes. The Princess had urged that "That sport best pleases that doth least know how," and Holofernes answers the lords with a line that stings: "This is not generous, not gentle, not humble." Wit that humiliates the weak is shown to be a failure of gentility.

• A comedy interrupted by death

  Marcadé's entrance turns games into grief. The ladies decline to make "a world-without-end bargain" in an hour, and each man receives a year of trial: a hermitage for the King, a hospital for Berowne. Rosaline's rule that "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it" makes his wit answerable to the suffering. The unfinished ending asks whether words and love can survive testing.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine in this play works chiefly as metaphor and as the setting of its final penance, but the metaphors are precise and Elizabethan. Armado's letter uses humoral language for melancholy and prescribes fresh air as "physic"; Berowne jokes that Dumaine's love-fever could be let out by incision, as in bloodletting; and he likens the lovestruck lords to plague houses marked with "Lord have mercy on us" and the spots called "the Lord's tokens." Rosaline's sentence sends Berowne to an hospital for a year to entertain the sick and dying, which raises a real question about the place of humour in care of the suffering. These are readings of imagery, not a medical theme the play develops at length.

• Act I, Scene 1

  Armado's letter to the King describes himself as besieged with melancholy and commending "the black-oppressing humour" to the physic of the park's healthy air; a parody of humoral self-diagnosis.

• Act I, Scene 2

  Armado asks Moth what it signifies when a man of great spirit grows melancholy, and the page mocks the fashionable equation of melancholy with greatness.

• Act IV, Scene 3

  Dumaine calls his love a fever in the blood; Berowne answers that incision would let it out in saucers, a joke on therapeutic bleeding.

• Act IV, Scene 3

  Berowne argues that fasting at the lords' age breeds illness and that love quickens every bodily sense, a comic physiology of the passions.

• Act V, Scene 2

  Berowne writes the plague-house inscription on the three lords, saying they caught the infection from the ladies' eyes and bear the plague tokens.

• Act V, Scene 2

  Rosaline imposes a twelvemonth of visiting the speechless sick and groaning patients, to see whether wit can make the pained smile; Berowne protests that mirth cannot reach a soul in agony.